The process of organizing a pegboard or other similar fixture involves placing each peg fixture in a correct location (by row and column of holes) in a back plane, and then placing each product on the correct peg fixture. This is a difficult and time-consuming process. In a typical retail environment—a grocery or pharmacy store—employees accomplish this process by trial and error, memory, or guide sheets. They are guided by experience, familiarity with the general arrangement, and by print-outs of schematic stocking plans (known as “planograms”).
The Retail industry is applying more and more technology to in-store operations with the goal of reducing costs. Retailers try to improve efficiency of in-store labor and ensure that decisions made centrally are correctly executed in their stores. This becomes more difficult as the numbers of stores controlled by a retailer rises. Achieving significant increases in worker productivity affords great cost savings that are directly measurable, and improving the effectiveness of strategy execution in the store yields further indirect savings and improvements in revenue.